Wolverine's Original Role In X-Men: Apocalypse, And Why It Changed

SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for X-Men: Apocalypse. If you have not yet had a chance to see the film, and don’t wish for any specifics to be revealed, please click away to another one of our wonderful articles!

To date, Hugh Jackman has reprised his role as Wolverine in every single movie with the word X-Men in it, and the newly released X-Men: Apocalypse doesn’t break that tradition. Instead, he is a key part of one of the movie’s biggest action sequences, seen released from the Weapon X program and killing a large number of dudes. What you probably don’t know, however, is that there were versions of the script that gave him a much larger role – however, his part was decreased in part because it stole some of the spotlight from Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique.

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of sitting down with X-Men writer/producer Simon Kinberg at the X-Men: Apocalypse press day in London, and it was during the interview that the filmmaker revealed the role that Wolverine almost had in the new blockbuster. Discussing Hugh Jackman’s history with the franchise and his developing part in the latest sequel, Kinberg explained,

There was always a notion that we wanted Wolverine to be in the movie. We wanted to find a way to feature him in the film, partly because Bryan [Singer] and I love Hugh [Jackman] so much. We love the character, obviously, and he’s such a huge part of the franchise. There were a lot of iterations of how Wolverine would enter and exit the movie. There was a version when he was going to come in at the midpoint of the film and be like the drill sergeant for the kids and take over as their leader. And we felt like that stepped on Jen’s role in the movie and becoming their leader.

With that idea off the table, and Bryan Singer and Simon Kinberg still wanting to find some way to get Wolverine into the action, they continued to think about ways to get him into X-Men: Apocalypse’s script. Eventually they figured it out:

As we were, again, conceptually brainstorming the script, we knew that the kids were going to be abducted, or that a lot of our main characters were going to be abducted and taken somewhere. So we thought it would be interesting to take them to Alkali Lake, and that they would naturally, potentially… that the Weapon X program would be there, and maybe that was a place to find Wolverine.